Tag: ninja

I had not realized how long Playmates has been producing TMNT figures since the re-launch of the franchise via the Nickelodeon cartoon, but the figures I’ll be reviewing today were released as part of the 11th wave of figures in 2014.

Even though the first figure I got from the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles :Out of the Shadows movie was not quite what I expected, I decided to give this line another chance and got me the movie version of Raphael.

The second character I got from Playmates’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Classic line is the hotheaded Raphael, and as soon as I opened the package, I realized there is a rather glaring issue with this line of action figures.

Even though I never really read Daredevil comics growing up, Elektra is one of those secondary characters that kick started the whole Ninjas-Are-Cool trend back in the day so, she was one of the characters I wanted the most to see in action figure form when the Marvel Universe line started.

The Cobra Cyber Ninja is not a terrible concept, but execution leaves something to be desired. The Cyber ninja wears bulky armored vests over a very generic body sculpt. In fact, the whole figure is kitbashed from various sources, most notably the Rise of Cobra EliteViper, with a head taken from some vehicle driver and the legs from the wave 1 version of Storm Shadow.

It may be hard to believe but only recently I have been acquainted with the early TMNT comics by Eastman & Laird. Those comics are much grittier and darker in tone than the version of the Turtles we got to experience in the 90’s, although even back then, Michelangelo already was the light-hearted one.

I have to say that it struck me as odd that even after the one-year delay for the movie premiere, the first wave of figures released by Hasbro for the G.I. Joe Retaliation movie line were not based on actual movie costumes. Some characters did benefit from this approach, of course, but some others were not as fortunate.

I do remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze from the late 80’s and early 90’s. In fact, even though I was certainly not in the target age bracket for the toys, I still ended up buying some action figures of them.

One type of figure I always wanted from the ARAH G.I. Joe line was red ninjas. Even though Hasbro did produce some of them years later, the first few versions were just repaints of old Storm Shadow molds

Well, after admitting that I am pretty much a fan of the ninja mythos presented in the old G.I. Joe comic books, it would be not much of a stretch to assume that Snake Eyes is another of my favorite Joes. And for the most part that would be correct, although not to the point of unabashedly praise any action figure made of this character.

The other day, I was at a store, perusing the action figure pegs and I came across a 4 inch. Sub-Zero figure that looked substantially different than the one I reviewed not long ago. A closer inspection revealed that Jazwares made another line of MK figures under the “Klassic” moniker, and this was one of them.

I was never a hardcore Mortal Kombat player. The gimmicky nature of the game’s graphic presentation and the rather cumbersome gameplay were simply no match against Street Fighter II in the struggle for my arcade tokens. However, the franchise prospered and spawned over the years a few more iterations of the game for release in home consoles and arcade systems, with cleaner graphics, streamlined gameplay and what’s more relevant for this review, improved character designs that now serve as inspiration for Jazwares to produce action figures.

Jazwares made another of the more readily recognizable characters in the Mortal Kombat game, Sub-Zero into a 4-inch action figure in their 2012 line. While in the first games the character models for Sub-Zero and Scorpion were identical, except for the coloring, on subsequent games the character designs grew more distinct from one another, although still adhering somewhat to the ninja-look characteristic to these games.

Arctic Assault Storm Shadow was released in 2009 as part of wave 3 of Hasbro’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra toy line. Even though the name is somewhat misleading, Storm Shadow did appear in the movie dressed (or undressed) like this in the movie, while in the arctic Cobra base, so technically, so the Artic Assault moniker is correct.

As part of the Not-Actually-Seen-In-The-Movie characters, Kamakura is constructed with a number of parts taken from the 25th Anniversary line as well as some of the newer molds used for the first batches of movie figures.

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